What Goes Around
by LOVEZINKSY
Summary: Coda to Chapter 121. After being informed of Katsuki's fight and subsequent house arrest, Katsuki's mother wants a little chat with her son at the front gates. ONESHOT.


crossposted from my ao3 account (**Hotel_Denouement**); originally posted 4/26/2018

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He doesn't get smacked as often as he used to when he was a little kid, and even more rarely does his mother really wind her arm back and make it count. It's been a while since he's gotten more than a sharp swat to the back of his head whenever he gets too mouthy.

When she slaps him this time, she makes sure it hurts. Rattles his teeth a little. He stays on his feet, but his head jerks hard, and he rocks with it. His cheek stings and the eye on that side waters involuntarily, _damn. _Katsuki isn't sure what hurts more, his face or his pride. She had texted him "_come outside to the gates_" and he had, because he knew what was coming and he would always do what she told him.

It sucks, though, because there are people around. Ponytail is out there, and—_fuck_—Todoroki. The guy with the cake and Tokoyami. He has an audience. They're studying outside or some shit, and their conversation had lulled momentarily when he came outside—day one of house arrest coming to an end, whatever, fuckfaces—but they'd picked back up talking once he stalked past, once they saw that he was going to meet whoever that was they saw standing by the strange car that had rolled up. His hearing is muffled in that ear for a few moments after she hits him, but when it clears he can hear they've all gone silent. Great.

It sucks because he deserves this one, too. That was one well-earned crack across the face. It's part of the reason why he doesn't immediately roll his head, rotate his jaw a bit, and look back at her. He stares off in the direction that his head had turned with the force of the slap, feeling the wetness in his one eye well up just enough to spill over once before drying up. It's weird and annoying to have one eye tearful and the other bone dry. _This doesn't count as crying,_ he thinks crossly.

"Are you happy, Katsuki?" she demands, and she sounds _so tired. _Katsuki could laugh.

"What, like, in general?" he says casually, thumbing away the errant tear and flicking it onto the grass. One drop. _Drink up_, he thinks dully towards the lawn. _You'll get watered in the morning._

"You can't leave that boy alone for once in your god damn life?" she asks, pretending he hadn't spoken.

Katsuki twitches, but it's small. It doesn't matter anymore. _That _doesn't matter anymore. "He's fine."

"He hasn't been through enough with you? You had to do this at U.A. too, you little shit?"

"He's _fine_," Katsuki repeats through clenched teeth. He wishes his mother would lower her voice. Everyone out here playing witness knows about him and Deku—maybe not the nastier pre-U.A. details, but they've all witnessed firsthand how Katsuki behaves, and he doesn't _care. _He's never cared what anyone thinks about how he feels about Deku. The closest he's come to caring about that is not wanting to…

Well. Not wanting to get caught hurting him. Because it's unacceptable, and he knows it.

"I thought that was over for you," says his mom, "after the sludge incident."

God, Katsuki _hates _her. The last thing he wants to do is remember that or even acknowledge her bringing that shit up, but it bubbles up out of his mouth like the titular slime: "It _is _over, this was different!"

"_How?_"

Katsuki bites his tongue hard and opens up a cut that had mostly healed. It tastes like copper and is shaped like Deku's fist on his mouth. His mom's hand has never broken skin, but he has to ground himself more under it than he ever did when fighting Deku. He grinds his teeth together and squares his shoulders when she grabs the strap of his tank and demands again, "How was it different this time, Katsuki? Answer me."

"Because he fought back!" he shouts. He remembers he doesn't want this to be overheard, so he drops his voice to continue, "He has a Quirk now. He could take it. He fought back."

His mother lets go of his shirt. Pushes him back a little. There's a look on her face, wrinkling her nose a bit. Disgust. To Katsuki's horror, it makes his sinuses sting a little. _Do not_, he warns his tear ducts, but it's hard when she looks at him like that. It's worse than when she calls him weak and means it in front of All Might and Aizawa.

"That's what makes it okay to you?" she asks. "This is _so _fucking funny."

His voice only shakes a little when he snaps, "What is?"

"That _this _is how you finally acknowledge what you did before."

There's a hot, sick heat resting in Katsuki's belly, leaden. He knows that it is shame, but he would rather die than be ashamed of himself. Still, he looks down and away, like a submissive dog that's just pissed on the carpet. He doesn't want to think about what he probably looks like to his classmates. He can't hear over his thundering pulse, but he desperately hopes that Yaoyorozu, prim and proper and uppity Ponytail, is distracting the others. Hopefully she's the type who doesn't _want _to see other people's dirty laundry.

Katsuki can feel Todoroki watching, though. He can't tell if he finds this comforting or if it makes him feel a million times worse.

"It's fucking hilarious, actually," his mom continues. She laughs once, but it's humorless and harsh. Katsuki hears himself in her voice. "Let's go over the math on this one, because it's rich. I love it. _Look at me, Katsuki_."

Her hand comes up under his chin, palm flat and hard, knocking his teeth together and forcing his head up. He clenches his jaw and looks just to the right of her face and focuses on keeping his eyes dry. He can get through this. He just needs to weather her storm and hope her voice doesn't carry to the others.

She's right, of course she's right; whatever she's going to say to him—and he's got a pretty good idea of what it is—is going to be spot-on, and Katsuki knows it. What he cannot do out here in the open, in front of her, in front of _them_, is _deal with it. _He can do that alone in his dorm. Hell, he halfway did it last night, his lip dripping blood on Deku's panting face, Deku's blood smeared across his knuckles, hard-won for the first time in Katsuki's life.

It is difficult, and is going to continue being difficult, moving forward with Deku catching up, and matching his pace, and threatening to surpass him. It's hard, but he already made that first step last night, with All Might figuratively taking him by the hand to get him going. Katsuki is set into motion, and he has never known anything other than pushing onward. He has drive, he _is _drive, and this has dismantled his pride entirely and shaken his foundations, but this is what he has always done, and will always continue to do. His future remains wide open and promising and hopeful.

But this, what his mom is laying out for him, is not his future. It isn't something he can work on or improve. It's something Katsuki refuses to look at because it is behind him, and he has never been the type to look back. But he knows—they both know, fuck, _Deku _knows most of all, and that's the worst part—that what he's done in the past is still affecting him today, right now, and probably always will until the day he dies.

"The sludge villain," his mother says. "You were so angry with him for trying to help you. But you left him alone after that. I know you did. Why?"

"You don't know that," Katsuki grits out. "I didn't tell you shit about anything after that—" She slaps him again, not as hard this time, but sharp enough to surprise him.

Wiggling his jaw, he says, "Stop _hitting _me, fuck's sake!"

"I know you better than anyone, Katsuki, and I know you left Izuku alone after that day. I want you to tell me why."

He clamps his mouth shut. That old, ugly shame he's spent so much time pretending doesn't exist swells up. It's a messy thing, that shame, all the facets to it and why it exists. All the _before thens _and _after thats _where he's equally angry with himself and Deku, humiliated at needing to be rescued and that useless attempt by Deku, the unspoken cease and desist he'd enforced upon himself because he couldn't _do it_, he couldn't bring himself to taunt and belittle and hurt him when teachers weren't looking after Deku had done that, just hours after Katsuki had told him—

Katsuki wonders what would happen if he told his mom that he told Izuku to kill himself that day. She'd probably knock his head clean off his shoulders even if it's well over a year after the fact. He'd deserve it, is the thing. That's the hardest part to think about.

She grabs his face when he starts to turn his head away, her fingers grasping him under the jaw, tight and pressing on tender bruises left from last night. He exhales sharply through his nose and wishes angrily that she wouldn't do this _here_. Four classmates are watching, for God's sake. The humiliation of that alone is making it hard to keep it together, but the sheer heat of her anger and the disgust in her eyes on top of it is what threatens to make him crumble.

"Answer me!"

"Because I felt bad." He keeps his voice low, slightly strangled, because he knows if he yells then he will cry. He will not give his mother the satisfaction of making him cry, and he absolutely will not cry in front of any other classmate than Deku.

It's hard though, because his answer isn't enough yet to quell his mother's overwhelming anger. She doesn't let him go; she pulls him closer, making him stumble. He doesn't resist it. He never has. This is his mother.

"Why did you feel bad?" she asks. He hesitates for a split second, because he's not _ready_, but she squeezes his jaw and raises her voice, "Katsuki."

"Because I shouldn't have been doing it in the first place."

"_Doing what?_" she shouts.

"Hurting him!" Katsuki's eyes are wet. He can't keep his voice down. He wraps his hand around his mother's wrist and wrenches his face from her fingers. He staggers and clenches his fists at his sides, staring shamefully at the grass. His vision lenses through tears. He sees pearls of it drop to the ground. _Drink up. _"And treating him like shit and beating him up and all that stuff I did, I did it when nobody was looking because it was wrong and I would get in trouble, and I felt bad after that."

Her voice is quiet when she speaks again, and it makes him feel worse. "He didn't deserve any of the shit you put him through, Katsuki. None of it."

"I _know_." He wipes his eyes on his arm.

"Have you apologized for it? Any of it?" she asks. Katsuki just sniffs and stares resolutely at the lawn. He hears her sigh. "Do you even want to apologize?"

He can't even put himself there in his mind's eye. He's never apologized for anything in his life. And something tells him that Deku has long since forgiven him for it all, because there had been no righteous fury or payback in Deku's fighting last night. None of his kicks or punches landed with a sense of _this is for everything you've done to me. _If and when Katsuki apologizes, he knows Izuku's eyes will shine and his smile will be wobbly and he'll say some shit like, "I forgave you a long time ago, Kacchan," and then, fuck, what then could keep Katsuki from wrapping himself around him and weeping like a child?

"I don't know," is what he says, because it's true. But his mom seems to accept it. He feels her fingers brush his face again and he recoils slightly, but relaxes when they travel up to his hair. She brushes it back from his forehead.

"I love you, Katsuki," she tells him, and she sounds sad. "You know that's why I do this, don't you?"

"That's fucked up," he says dully. Predictably, her fingers tighten in his hair, but then they loosen again.

She does love him. Katsuki knows this. It would be easier, he thinks, to hate her if she didn't. Erratically, his mind flashes back to when he leaned against the wall in a mostly secluded stadium tunnel, listening to a sad conversation that wasn't his to hear. Katsuki wonders if Todoroki loves Endeavor even a little bit, or if Endeavor has made it very simple for his son to hate him fully. Endeavor has probably never been tender in the in-between, to make it hard and confusing.

Katsuki doesn't let her kiss him when she finally fucks off, but he waits for her to get back in the car and drive away before he turns back to the dorms. His eyes aren't dry yet but he still risks looking at the four studying outside. Sure enough, Yaoyorozu and Tokoyami are pointedly, animatedly talking and not looking at him, while Satou nods way too vigorously between them to have believably been listening to them.

Todoroki catches his eye, openly staring. Katsuki stares right back. He knows his eyes are red and swimming, his face blotchy, but he doesn't look away. _I see you, _they both say. _You see me._

Inside, Deku is cleaning the windows. He's made the common room stink like Windex. The sight of him, stupidly, makes fear bubble in Katsuki's veins, like he heard every word between him and his mother outside. Katsuki's not ready to acknowledge it to Izuku yet. But the anxiety fizzles out quickly when Deku doesn't look at him; it's not a pointed avoidance, his eyes just slide over Katsuki when he walks in the front door, and he gets back to work.

Katsuki snatches up the second rag dangling over the lip of the bucket at Deku's feet, takes the other bottle of Windex, and moves to another window. They clean in silence.


End file.
